Games of Our Childhood
by SJlikeslists
Summary: The children of the Centre were still children. The games they learned to play together would last the rest of their lives.
1. Rock, Paper, Scissors

Disclaimer: _The Pretender_ is not mine.

Normal children did not spend their time hiding inside of vents. Miss Parker may not have had much experience in what normal was for children, but she was sure of that. Angelo was a special level of not normal - even for the Centre. She did not hold that against him. She was beginning to think that she rather liked it. It was a selfish notion on her part, but she did not mind being a little bit selfish. There were so many things in her life that she wanted that she did not get to have that she got a little bit possessive about the ones that she did. A little boy who spent his time hiding in the darkened air exchange system had not been on her list of things which she wanted, but friends were enough of a rarity for her that she would take whatever she could get. Besides, Angelo was sweet (if a little hard to understand), and he had needed someone to coax him out of those vents before he starved to death. The adults that were in charge at the Centre were surprisingly clueless when it came to children despite all of the time that they supposedly spent studying them. She was happy to have been able to help.

Jarod was still her best friend, but he was always so busy. They were taking up more and more of his time with sims. She knew that they said that his work was important (and Jarod certainly believed that it was), but it did not seem right to her that they expected him to do so many things that the adults around him could not be bothered to do on their own - not that she would ever say that to anyone out loud. She knew better. She had known better for a long time.

She was also supposed to be busy. As far as anyone knew, she was. She was supposed to be completing her lessons for the day in a room several floors above their heads. It had not taken her long to figure out that her father had no intention of interrupting his day to check on her. As long as the assigned work was completed at the end of the day, no one asked any questions. It was supposed to be enough to keep her very busy. Her mother had always encouraged her to let everyone think that schoolwork took more effort than it actually did. It was an ingrained habit, and it had not occurred to her to change it after she was gone. She polished off her tasks in just under an hour and then amused herself as best she could for the rest of the day. Angelo was quickly becoming one of her regular visits. No one ever seemed to come looking for him. The vents were some sort of a no man's land in a world that was otherwise strictly controlled. She brought him snacks, and he ate most of them even if he always gave her a sad look when it wasn't Cracker Jacks that she was offering.

He was a good listener, and she found herself letting words come out in the dim, enclosed space that she normally would not have uttered. It was never anything as drastic as her thoughts about Jarod (not even the vents were a safe enough feeling place for that), but she talked about her days and her father and her home and the way that she got lonely. Angelo munched on caramel covered pieces of popcorn and listened attentively and said random things that were not so very random when she was awake in her bed at home at night thinking them over.

They were not talking on this day. They were sitting in quiet companionship and taking turns reaching in and pulling out pieces from the Cracker Jack box. It had become a bit of a game for them to eat one piece at a time and see how long they could make the box last. It was nice. It was comfortable, and she did not have much of either of those left in her life. She could almost pretend that she was having a quiet day at home with the younger sibling that she had never had waiting for their parents to be ready to play a game with them like that snow covered day from long ago before her world had come crashing down around her ears.

"Play?" The little boy beside her asked with his eyes scrunching up the way they always did when he pronounced a word that he seemed to have plucked out of thin air without knowing what it meant. "Play," he repeated smiling at her this time as if he had decided that the word meant something good.

"Alright," she told him tolerantly. She _had_ just been thinking about how nice it was to sit down and play a game together. There were no stacks of board games just sitting around in a closet at the Centre, and someone (namely Sydney) would notice if she swiped the chess set from his office. She would have to teach him something they could play just with themselves.

"Teach," Angelo told her with a small nod of his head as though he was agreeing with something that she had not even said. She wondered about that sometimes.

"I said alright," she stated a bit testily never liking when her thoughts went down that path. "Give me your hand," she ordered. She carefully wrapped his little fingers into a fist and held them together. "Rock," she told him. "Remember how to make that shape." She next pushed his hand out flat between her own and held it up in front of him. "Paper." Then, she folded his thumb and two fingers together while separating the other two from each other. "Scissors," she announced. "Show me." She helped him once with the placement of his fingers on scissors and started to walk him through the rules.

She would lose every single round once he caught on, but she would not mind as much as she usually did when she noticed the way his eyes had brightened while he nearly laughed out loud at the expression on her face as he guessed correctly time after time. She would end up the one doing the laughing even though she would clap her hand over her mouth to cut off the sound. Angelo would pat her awkwardly on the arm and tell her "Not bad. Doesn't mind." She would fall asleep that night thinking about those words and wondering if they were true.

-RPS RPS RPS-

Miles away a little boy locked in a dark shed and curled into a corner would have the worried lines on his face smooth out in his sleep as his fingers moved into strange patterns of a game that he was not playing.

-RPS RPS RPS-

Years later, Miss Parker would seem to have an uncanny knack for knowing just where in the Centre hierarchy each person whose path she crossed fell. She would have a strange ability to know who was about to be tipped out of power and who was about to make an ascending move, and no one ever noticed the man that roamed the vents making the odd hand signs of a children's game at her from behind and above those people's heads.


	2. Hide and Seek

Disclaimer: _The Pretender_ is not mine.

The vents were a little bit constricting. They were a great place to spend time when you did not want to be found, but they were not the place that you wanted to be if you needed to stretch your legs. They had to get out of them sometimes. In all honesty, there were maybe some occasions where she was feeling a little more reckless and a little less like she cared whether or not she got caught. Disappointed, reproachful looks and agitated, raised voices had potential as a nice change of pace when all you had gotten was cool indifference for weeks on end. That was not quite fair to the others - not considering that they would also be in trouble if they were caught. When she was having one of her reckless moments, she got a little bit short sighted. She just got so tired of being ignored and not knowing how to make it stop.

There were a surprising number of open spaces in the Centre if you went looking for them. There were stretches of hallway that no one ever seemed to use. There were rooms that were all but abandoned on the opposite wings to busier sections. All of the different projects seemed to like to keep their distance from each other and spread out accordingly. The catch was the blinking red lights that peered at you from corners, nooks, and crannies. She had learned that the watching mechanical eyes mounted in the building might see everything, but that did not mean that anyone was watching what they were watching. Their excursions to the less populated areas of the building might be recorded somewhere, but they would never be viewed so long as they gave no one any reason to check further into who might have been where. It was safe enough to suit her mood often enough.

She figured that Angelo would be a natural at hide and seek what with the vent dwelling and all, and she taught him the game one day when she was particularly moody and almost wishing for a sweeper to haul her off for a chat with her father. She was louder than she needed to be. She even found herself stomping her feet at one point. No sweepers (or anyone else) came to find her despite the noise. She eventually stopped her passive aggressive attempts at precipitating a confrontation and started looking for Angelo in earnest. It took her almost three hours, and she had a sneaking suspicion that he had allowed her to find him in the end.

She decided that she didn't mind when he asked to play again. He wanted to hide; she had no patience for crouching and waiting for someone to discover her. She liked seeking. There was something about the challenge that appealed to her. There was even something strangely soothing about the methodicalness of it. She found herself thinking in unfamiliar patterns and following strange hunches as she got better at determining where he might be.

It was on the third occasion that Angelo requested that they play that Jarod was with them. She had gone through the basics in answer to Jarod's questioning tilt of the head. He looked intrigued and a little bit confused the way that he often did when he could not see what the point of something was. He somehow never seemed to understand that not everything had to have a larger purpose. She thought that they really needed to work on that.

"Are you sure you want to play?" She asks him doing her best to hide the smirk that she feels coming. He's going to lose. She knows it. Angelo knows it (in fact, Angelo is smirking the smirk that she is hiding from behind him). No one, not even Jarod, will be able to hide better than Angelo. She will be the one doing the seeking, so that leaves Jarod being the first one found (and, thus, the loser). It will probably be good for him - he's so good at everything all the time, but he doesn't need to know that. "We take this game very seriously."

"I want to play," he reassures her.

"Okay, then," she lets the smirk show. "You asked for it."

Jarod does not play the same way that Angelo does. He never settles into one spot to stay there. He keeps changing his hiding place as if he is constantly evaluating his options and making decisions about the relative safety of each place as he goes. She finds it a little bit annoying because that isn't really the way that the game should be played (even though it makes it easier on her to find him when he is moving around than when he is still). As predicted, he loses round after round, but he still insists that he wants to keep playing.

Parker isn't sure that the boys would ever have stopped playing if she had not called things to a halt with the reminder that her father would send someone to look for her if she didn't get back. (It was one of her less moody days, and she wasn't looking for an altercation at the time.)

It won't be the last time that they play the game.

The little boy locked in the shed once again wrapped his arms around his legs as he crouched in the corner. He rocked himself back and forth and mumbled words designed to offer himself comfort.

"She'll come soon. She'll find me. She will. She'll come soon." He keeps telling himself that as he waits until years of disappointment cause him to bury the fact that there used to be a she for whom he was waiting.

In later years, Jarod still flits from place to place never staying in one spot. He breaks all the rules of hiding with his taunting messages and his excursions into Centre business. Angelo still hides better than anyone even in plain sight of those who should realize what it is that they are seeing. Parker is still the seeker often annoyed at Jarod's antics but always continuing to play until something to do with her father calls her temporarily away. Lyle never does realize why it is that he feels cheated out of something each time that he watches his sister searching for their only half hiding pretender.

The game keeps going, and Parker still doesn't know if the boys will ever stop playing.


	3. Hopscotch

Disclaimer: _The Pretender_ is not mine.

She never taught the boys how to play hopscotch.

It never occurred to her that it was something to include in the list of things to do from the outside world that she made a habit of bringing in to them. If she had stopped to think about it, then she would have determined that it would not have been very practical. Even the dimmest of sweepers was likely to realize that something was up if confronted with a series of boxes with numbers in them etched onto a hallway floor. That thought did not, however, cross her mind because she never considered hopscotch when she was teaching games.

She played it alone.

There was a square of poured concrete out back of the house she shared with her father (not the one where she had stayed with her mother) that was supposed to be for outdoor grilling and entertaining. It was never used for that purpose because her father never entertained - at least not at his home. He was forever meeting "clients" and going off to see "business associates." Those things always happened at other places. She didn't know where. She was never invited to tag along. Sometimes, she thought that he was starting to forget about her altogether. He always said that he would "make arrangements," but those arrangements did not always materialize. She had been on her own for an entire weekend once, and she did not think that he had ever noticed.

He certainly hadn't noticed that she had taken over the square of concrete and marked it out with a hopscotch board or that she kept a collection of stones lined up along the edge ready to be picked up whenever she decided that she might need them. She didn't think that he would ever notice because she had never seen him enter the backyard. Someone came and took care of the yard for them. Her daddy was not the yard work type (or the grilling type). When he insisted that he needed quiet in the house for an important phone call or because he needed to concentrate on something that required his undivided attention, then she would take herself out and toss the stones as she jumped the blocks outlined in chalk.

It was kind of boring, but she did it anyway. It kept her out of her daddy's way, and there was something numbing about it when she was afraid that her tongue might get away from her. She had to sidestep the one - the same way that she could never say the truth when her daddy broke another set of plans with the words "you don't mind, do you, Angel?" She had to jump over the three - the same way that she had to avoid anyone noticing that she didn't like what was happening with Angelo or Jarod. She had to make sure not to touch the seven - the same way that she could never tell the grown-ups what she really thought or let them see what she was really doing when she was supposed to be locked upstairs not noticing any of the things that went on in the lower levels of the building.

She did not play hopscotch because she liked it. She played hopscotch because it was a physical representation of her life that helped her to keep everything compartmentalized. It was an exercise that helped her remember how important it was that she never let herself step outside the lines, that she never let herself get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that she always knew exactly how much force she needed to use to get herself to the next safe place that she was going.

She kind of hated hopscotch, but she kept playing. She kept saying "of course, Daddy." She kept biting her tongue inside the upper levels of the Centre. She kept the things she knew a secret. She kept a tighter hold on her temper in the times that she was tempted to let herself get caught in the places where she shouldn't be with the people she was not supposed to be seeing. She jumped when she needed to jump. She went to the side when she needed to go to the side. She stayed in the lines. She always looked ahead to keep an eye on the next safe place to be and how to get there.

That was her life. She might remember that there had been a time when things hadn't been that way. That didn't matter. It was what she had now. Her life was a hopscotch board unless she was keeping company with the two boys from the lower levels. Her life was a hopscotch board unless she was sitting in the vents or leading them off on an adventure.

She never taught the boys to play hopscotch. It never occurred to her to inflict the confines and the neverendingness (because you never reached the end on her board, the game just started all over again) of the game on them.

The little boy who never told anyone (not even his best friend) about being locked up in the shed never had a compulsion to hop or jump or skip over things at strange times for no apparent reason. He never saw the series of boxes painted on a playground and wondered why they seemed so familiar.

The little boy who hid in the vents never learned to stay inside the boxes of his life. He went outside and beside and all out of order and never thought anything about reasons why he shouldn't.

The little boy who dreamed of going to see the outside never learned that some of the boxes simply couldn't be touched. He grew up to poke and prod and keep edging up to the line and over it without caring for the penalties incurred.

The little girl kept playing and playing long after she was no longer a little girl, and she kept playing all alone.


End file.
